Undercover FBI Agent Infiltrates NAMBLA

Excerpted from The Undercover Agent Comes in from the Cold, by Robert K Elder, published Oct 16, 2006, by Chicago Tribune:

While buying surface-to-air missiles and counterfeit $100 bills from Chinese nationals, he facilitated offshore trysts for pedophiles and scored crystal meth from a Los Angeles gang.

But Wallace had a secret: His name wasn’t Wallace at all.

“Robert William Wallace” was a front, a name taken by undercover FBI agent Robert Hamer…

The final sting

In Hamer’s final undercover sting, in 2005, the bureau targeted the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), an organization that advocates sex with children.

For most of that career, he posed as tough guys, gentlemen thugs. Transforming into a homosexual pedophile wasn’t easy. Hamer found the group’s appetites repulsive and worried about blending in.

“When I first started posing as a boy lover, I thought I looked too much like a cop. I was a little too macho,” he says. “I thought, ‘What am I going to do to throw them off?’ It was almost like the heavens opened up
and said, ‘Handicapped.’ And that’s what I did.”

Hamer went to the Salvation Army, bought a cane for $5 and hobbled his way to eight convictions. Over three years, Hamer became part of the association’s inner circle, eventually helping to facilitate a boat trip
to Mexico for men to have sex with boys.

Prosecutors said that David Mayer, a Chicago flight attendant and psychologist, suggested the trip to Mexico at a NAMBLA convention in 2004. On a surveillance tape, Mayer said he kept his job as a flight
attendant so he could travel overseas to places where underage sex for hire was commonplace.

In February 2005, the FBI arrested Mayer and two colleagues on a San Diego dock for alleged interstate travel for the purpose of illicit sex. To keep his cover, Hamer pretended to faint when his fellow agents
carted him off. Mayer received a sentence of more than three years in federal prison.